When God Speaks

I've been itching to write. 

These past couple months have been quite the adventure! I'm now a junior in college, just started a new internship, and am still trying to get into the swing of things. It's been so fun though, and I am extremely grateful that God has provided the means for me to continue studying here. 

Tonight, we're talking about hearing God's voice. Let me just say, I've always been a bit skeptical about people who claimed that they could "heard God speak." I was having a conversation about this over the summer with my good friend, Courtney, and she pointed me to this video by J.P. Moreland. It's about an hour long, but I PROMISE you, it's worth it! It completely wrecked me, in the best way possible. J.P. Moreland shares about the 6 ways that he's personally experienced God speak to him:

1. Prophecy, word of knowledge
2. Dreams & visions
3. God puts thoughts and feelings in our mind.
4. By way of angelic visitation
5. Impressions: a sense to say or do something
6. Providential circumstances

This message transformed my view of God speaking and resulted in an openness to His voice that I never had before. Since then, there have been a few instances in which I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was trying to get something across to me. 

The specific instance that I'll be sharing about today, happened about three weeks ago:

My freshman year of college, I had dinner with one of my floormates. We ran into each other and spontaneously started talking, then decided on the spot to have a meal together. At the end of our meal, we sat outside on the grass and she looked me straight in the eye and said, "Janelle, I feel like I need to tell you that God is going to use you to impact the lives of many young women. He's going to use you to reach high school and college-aged women." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I never told my friend before about my passion for reaching young women. Never once did I mention to her the permanent image of the hollow faces of the hundreds of girls that would pass me every day in high school that developed within me a desire to speak God's truth into their lives. 

A few days passed, and as much as I wanted to believe that it must have been God speaking through her, I dismissed the thought because I didn't want to "overspiritualize" it. 

Fast forward to September 6th, 2014—I'm sitting in a chair next to another friend. This time, my friend stares at me intently for a good minute before saying, "You're beautiful." Now avoiding eye contact, I say, "Thaaanks..." My friend looks at me and says, "You're beautiful. I see that in you. Your internal beauty shines outward, externally." I'm a little taken aback by her compliment. "Thank you! I appreciate that," I tell her. My friend continues, "You know what, Janelle, I really feel like I need to tell you that God is going to use your story to inspire many young women—generations of high school and college-aged women." 

I sat there, both silent and completely astonished at the same time. It was in that moment that I absolutely knew that it was God. There was no reasonable explanation behind how two of my friends, who had never met each other before, could communicate almost the exact same thing to me at two completely different stages of my life.

So, that's where I'm at. It's incredible. It's scary. It's incredibly scary. But I know that this is something that I want to devote my life to fully. I don't know what exactly it will look like, or if it's even happening now and I'm just not realizing it, because it doesn't look like quite how I envisioned it. But that's exactly why I love it. God is giving me bits and pieces of confirmation to keep me going, but I'm not getting the full picture just yet. I wouldn't have it any other way.